September 27, 2012

Technical advances don't usually occur in a steady
progression of events. False starts, incorrect theories, misjudgments, clashes
of ego and outright fraud have been well documented throughout the course of
progress, even if General Electric did long ago pay Ronald Reagan to intone
"Progress is our most important product."

Still, we do manage to advance. The much ballyhooed picture
telephone that was introduced by Bell Telephone at the 1964 World's Fair in New
York City was a marketing dud, but now we have cell phones and services like Skype.

September 25, 2012

KERS and BER are acronyms; Kinetic Energy Recovery System and Brake Energy Recovery respectively-------i.e. related to brakes they mean the same thing. Actually BER is more specific while KERS can relate to KE more generally. BER pretty specifically relates to regenerative braking. KERS is somewhat more broad.

BER is used in both EV (electric only) and HYBRID vehicles and is needed to improve the mileage. In this context the BER idea is coupled to the electrically driven wheels and during stopping can provide re-charge energy into the main battery. I have written BLOGS on this subject and won’t repeat that here.

September 20, 2012

My 2009 Hyundai Sonata was equipped with a set of expensive name brand tires. Three and a half years and 10,000 miles later all four sidewalls were badly cracked and the right front sidewall was peeling off in big chunks. It had been in the right rear for the first part of its life and was then switched to the front. I have been feeling out curbs for more than 60 years, but I don't think I'm abusive. The sidewalls have always outlasted the treads, but this time I had to kiss a set of hardly-worn treads goodbye.

September 18, 2012

In the Mattel character line-up of He-Man, the epitome of evil was the character Skeletor.

I submit that Skeletor was gravely misunderstood and that, in fact, he had many admirable qualities.

Skeletor was highly intelligent and very well educated. He was also multicultural. He was literate in, and he fluently spoke, several different languages. In wanting to rule all of the planet Eternia, he was simply ambitious. He had great administrative, technical and financial skills having put together his enclave, Snake Mountain, with all of its capital equipment.

September 15, 2012

The headline in the title above appeared one day after the apparent explosion of a house in Brentwood LI. The incident took place August 14, 2012. In January 2011 the writer had put up a BLOG entitled, “RASH OF GAS LEAKS—”. In that BLOG I opined that MANY if not most of the gas leaks causing blasts on LI were in fact from LP gas and NOT from NG, natural gas. In this most recent incident National Grid got out immediately that NG was NOT supplied to this Brentwood address.

Because of the fatality, the investigation, according to the papers, was under the jurisdiction of the Police Department. The Police indicated that the investigation would be exhaustive and initial implications were that several code violations were involved. Mentioned in the news article was that the owner(s) of the property had two—200 pound propane tanks located outside the house in question. The news article does NOT say how the propane was being used i.e. for cooking, heating, hot water, etc. The Police volunteered NOTHING. The claim is the owner(s) did NOT have a “certificate” for propane use.

September 13, 2012

There was a time in the days of yore when slide rules were in fashion when aids to doing simple arithmetic were not universally at hand. There was the story "Succoring A Soroban" by John T. Frye, W9EGV, in the March 1963 issue of Popular Electronics that addressed this fact.

The story discussed the Japanese soroban which we might better know as the abacus. From that story we read: "The Japanese government gives examinations and issues three grades of licenses for operating the instrument. No one starting to study the soroban after he was out of his teens has ever been able to obtain a first-grade license."

September 11, 2012

Back around the time that the Pentium first came out, I was in this well-known-name department store with my wife. We decided to go do our shopping chores separately and then meet later. I went off and when I was finished, I was walking back past the electronics department where they were selling PCs. Suddenly I overheard a sales clerk snow jobbing this hapless couple who were trying to return a non-working PC that they'd bought there. He was telling them that they had voided the PC warranty by opening the box in which the PC had been delivered.

September 08, 2012

Some while ago, I visited a Shaker village in northern New Hampshire. Although the Shaker population is no longer there, their village remains to be seen and to be learned from.

One religious precept they held was the need to do everything in the best possible way. If you were to build something, if you were to repair something, you would have to do that work so well that it would not need to be repeated within your own lifetime. This is why Shaker furniture is so prized.

One example of that work ethic was visible in the way they made outdoor fences.

Consider the following sketch.

Every fence post of every fence in the village was embedded in a concrete footer to extend the life of each fence post to the maximum.

Wouldn't it be great if everything made today was made to a work ethic like that?